Oh dear. My iRiver is finally full – there is only 3Mb of space left on the disk.

If I want to get some more of my vinyl on there, or buy anything new, I will have to start deleting stuff, because my budget doesn’t stretch to getting a 40Gb model just yet. I already had to ditch the JS Bach.

This is probably as good a time as any to see what is actually on the machine. I have not been entirely strict about tagging all the tracks with genre information, so some of this is a bit approximate.

In total I have 8946 tracks there, which would last me 24 days, 10 hours and 27 minutes if I played the whole lot from beginning to end.

There is music by hundreds and hundreds of artists – quite a few have only one song on there – but 25 artists account for about a quarter of the diskspace.

In terms of the number of tracks, the top artists are Genesis(155), Yes(149), Pink Floyd(121), Crowded House(117), Les Negresses Vertes(108) and Jean-Michel Jarre(103).

In terms of the number of minutes of music, the top artists are Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Metallica, Jean-Michel Jarre and Kraftwerk.

I guess I am really showing my age there – 5% of the music on my iRiver is either Genesis or Yes! (I was lumping Roger Waters in with Pink Floyd and Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett in with Genesis. Crowded House includes all the Neil Finn and Finn Brothers albums too)

But although there is a lot of normal ‘dad rock’ on there I also found that there are 603 punk tracks, 544 reggae tracks, 458 rap tracks, 351 by French artists, 300 by African artists, 167 by Arabic artists, and a frankly surprising 125 German tracks (and that doesn’t include Kraftwerk!) as well as 226 blues songs.

The real surprise was finding in that list of the 25 most-represented artists such names as The Levellers, Joachim Witt, Angelique Kidjo, The Shamen and Ozric Tentacles, alongside the usual suspects like Radiohead, REM, Stevie Wonder, Metallica and Megadeth.

The other side of the coin is finding out who I don’t have much stuff by. There is not a single Beatles song (Just one Paul McCartney and two Lennon solo songs), only three Elvis Presley songs (compared to 36 Elvis Costello), only 4 Beach Boys songs.

So does this mean that, for example, the Newtown Neurotics (2 songs), Salt N Pepa (2 songs) and United Balls (4 songs) are more important to me than the Beatles?